| The Vanishing | |
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Original Dutch film poster |
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| Directed by | George Sluizer |
| Produced by | Anne Lordon George Sluizer |
| Written by | Novel: Tim Krabbé Screenplay: George Sluizer Tim Krabbé |
| Starring | Bernard-Pierre Donnadieu Johanna ter Steege Gene Bervoets |
| Music by | Hennie Vrienten |
| Cinematography | Toni Kuhn |
| Editing by | George Sluizer Lin Friedman |
| Distributed by | Argos Films |
| Release date(s) | Netherlands: October 27, 1988 France: December 20, 1989 United States: 1990 |
| Running time | 107 minutes |
| Country | Netherlands France |
| Language | French Dutch |
| Budget | ƒ 250,000 ($165,000) |
The Vanishing (Dutch: Spoorloos, literally "Traceless" or "Without a Trace") is a French/Dutch film adaptation of the novella The Golden Egg by Tim Krabbé, released October 27, 1988. Directed by George Sluizer and starring Bernard-Pierre Donnadieu, the film is about the disappearance of a young Dutch woman and her lover's obsessive search. In France the film was released under the title L'homme qui voulait savoir (The Man Who Wanted to Know).
On the film's American release in 1990, The Vanishing received great critical acclaim from film critics. Sluizer later remade the film for an English version in 1993, but the remake was poorly received.[1]
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A Dutch couple, Rex Hofman (Gene Bervoets) and Saskia Wagter (Johanna ter Steege), are on a cycling holiday in France. As they are driving, Saskia tells Rex of a recurring dream that she had, in which she is drifting through space in a golden egg. She tells Rex that this time there was someone else in another golden egg, and that if they were to collide, everything would be over. She said that being stuck in the golden egg was terrifying loneliness. Their car runs out of gas and they are stranded inside a tunnel. They quarrel for a while, but make up and eventually get going again.
Later they stop at a petrol station, where Saskia goes into the shop for drinks and never returns. Rex waits, getting more worried and nervous by the minute as Saskia does not emerge. He soon starts to question people if they have seen her, but no one has any idea as to where she is. The only clue he has is a blurred photo he took of the surrounding area, in which he can just barely make out her red hair in a group of people next to the gas station entrance.
Rex cannot accept his loss and spends the next three years compulsively looking for her. He has a new girlfriend, Lieneke (Gwen Eckhaus), but she becomes so fed up with Rex's obsession to understand Saskia's ultimate fate that she leaves him. His quest even results in him explaining her story on television, revealing that he had the same dream as Saskia about the golden egg, and this has inspired him to continue searching.
In a series of intermittent flashbacks, Raymond Lemorne (Bernard-Pierre Donnadieu), a respectable, middle-class chemistry teacher — and Saskia's kidnapper — appears both alone and with his family, intricately plotting and planning his scheme to kidnap a random woman.
Eventually, Raymond, fascinated by Rex's fanatical compulsion to know what happened to Saskia, confronts Rex and admits to kidnapping her. He explains that he felt the need to test himself, to find out whether he could commit what he considered the ultimate act of evil. Rex's ultimate curiosity concerning Saskia keeps him from killing Raymond, which Raymond is fully aware of. Raymond finally invites Rex to the very same park and gas station where Saskia disappeared, and simply tells Rex that if he drinks a cup of coffee, which he tells Rex is spiked, he will experience what happened to Saskia. Rex eventually drinks the concoction, passes out, and wakes up in a coffin buried under the earth. His own disappearance soon makes the headline of a local newspaper.
The Vanishing was written by director George Sluizer and author Tim Krabbé, whose book The Golden Egg the film is based on. The film is faithful to the novel changing two factors. The film's plot is more complicated than the novel, including more flashbacks and a change in the film's character focus.[2] The second major difference is that the characters Rex Hofman and Raymond Lemorne spend more time together after meeting up.[2]
The Vanishing was released in the Netherlands on October 27, 1988. It was released to acclaim and the producers George Sluizer and Anne Lordon received the Golden Calf for the Best Full Length-feature film at the Netherlands Film Festival in 1988.[4] The Vanishing was the Dutch submission for Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 1988. The film was disqualified because the Academy determined that there was too much French dialog in the film to meet the requirements. AMPAS deemed that the film was unsuitable to represent the Netherlands. The Dutch declined to send another film, leaving them unrepresented for the first time since 1972.[5] The film was released in France on December 20, 1989 under the title L'Homme Qui Voulait Savoir (English: The Man Who Wanted to Know).[5] Johanna ter Steege won a European Film Award for Best Supporting Actress in 1988.[3]
The Vanishing was praised on international release.[6] It was released in the United States in 1991 and made the list of Top Foreign films of 1991 by the National Board of Review.[7] Desson Howe of The Washington Post praised the film's avoidance of cliches, noting that it is "refreshingly free of manipulative scenes involving running bath water, jagged-edge cutlery and bunnies in the saucepan".[8] Howe also made note of the unusual move of revealing the killer immediately and spending significant time learning about him.[8] Roger Ebert wrote a similar approval of this in the Chicago Sun Times stating "One of the most intriguing things about "The Vanishing" is the film's unusual structure, which builds suspense even while it seems to be telling us almost everything we want to know."[9] Of the negative remarks, Ken Hanke of Mountain Xpress referred to the film as "Okay, but wildly overrated and predictable."[10] The Vanishing holds a very high critical rating at the film review database Rotten Tomatoes, with 100% approval rating from critics with an average rating of 8.3/10.[10] Empire magazine placed the film at number 67 in their list of "The 100 Best Films Of World Cinema" in 2010.[11]
The first North American copies of the film were released on Laserdisc by Image Entertainment on November 3, 1997.[12] It was later released on VHS by Fox Lorber on November 11, 1997[13] followed by a DVD version released on May 13, 1998.[14] The latest version of the film on DVD was released by The Criterion Collection on September 18, 2001.[15] The Criterion Collection version contains the original French trailer and an essay on the film by film critic Kim Newman as a supplemental material.[16]
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